social media

Benchmarking: If You Don’t Know Where You Are, How Will You Know Where You’re Going?

LEADING THOUGHTS In this post, I want to address benchmarking, without which metrics is meaningless. Benchmarking provides the context that you need in order to make metrics meaningful. Imagine you start measuring social media, and you discover that you had 1,000 social media mentions in all channels. Now what? Is that good or bad? I have no idea! To really understand this, you need context. What’s customary for a product like yours? How much buzz is the product category garnering? How does it compare to your own performance? Let’s dig in and figure out what you should be benchmarking against.

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The Oldest Social Gesture: The Handshake

LEADING THOUGHTS Once upon a time (a year or so ago), I tweeted something, to which someone responded: “Hey, you should meet @alizasherman“. I no longer remember the particulars of the context, nor does it matter really. What matters is that through this Twitter introduction, Aliza and I virtually “shook hands”, mutually followed and started to build a “professional acquaintance” relationship, tracking each others’ personal and professional developments, commenting, tweeting and retweeting. The example of how Aliza and I met is just that: an example. This has happened many times, where a relationship was sparked in digital channels and allowed to flourish due to meeting face to face. The connection is almost always stronger when it’s reinforced in person. And this is just the beauty of social networks: it allows us to meet people we wouldn’t ordinarily meet, either due to geographical constraints or even personality traits (some people, like me, for example, are more shy in person than online). Especially with Twitter, which is an open network, you can meet whoever you want, whenever you want.

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Swimming In The Social River

LEADING THOUGHTS Twitter is a river. Think of the image that a river conjures up… It’s babbling, full of life, effervescent. In some areas, it appears to move really fast, and even may have cascading waterfalls. Twitter reminds me of a river, barreling forward at an enormous speed. Just like there are many streams of water in a river, there are many conversations going on at the same time, in parallel, together and orthogonally. At times, it moves at a million miles a minute. Some other times, it’s seemingly dormant, only to wake up 5 minutes later. They say that you can’t enter the same river twice, because it won’t be the same river. Twitter is the same.